1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to online advertising, and in particular, to a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for encrypting/securing/data/content during a real-time advertising auction process.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online advertising has become an integral part of the Internet. Different models exist for advertisers to purchase advertisements displayed to end-users. Further, advertisers are often willing to pay a premium for a targeted advertisement based on a user's profile, demographic, etc. Online auctions that are controlled by an end-user's browser may be utilized to sell a particular advertisement/impression for a particular user. However, in such an online auction, it is desirable to maintain security of (i.e., limited access to) all of the data exchanged (e.g., user privacy and advertiser data security).
Prior art mechanisms fail to provide a secure environment for such an online auction. These problems may be better understood with a more detailed description of prior art online display advertising and bidding processes.
Online display advertising faces many inefficiencies in supply and demand. On the supply side, large publishers and ad networks sell excess inventory in bulk, yielding an eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions). As used herein, the term “impression” refers to a view, ad view, or load of an advertisement. On the demand side, ad networks and exchanges that have gathered unique demographic, behavioral, and interest information on end users are not able to find all the impressions they need to fulfill their budgets. In general, the core of the inefficiency is two-fold—(1) different siloed auctioning systems do not talk to one another on an impression-by-impression basis; and (2) buyers do not have access to their cookies on the end user before taking possession of the impression.
Cookies are small pieces of text stored on a user's computer by a web browser. The information in the cookie is sent from a particular domain to the web browser and each particular cookie is only accessible from the domain that originally sent the information. Consequently, oftentimes, an advertiser has knowledge about particular users (i.e., their preferences, practices, etc.), but when a third-party web-page has code that instructs the browser to request an advertisement, the advertiser does not have access to the end-user's cookies before purchasing the advertisement impression.
A real-time bidding (RTB) mechanism may address the common web based advertising issues by providing the framework for an impression-by-impression first price or a second price auctioning system. Details describing such an RTB mechanism are described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/959,385 filed on Dec. 18, 2007 which is incorporated by reference herein. RTB allows potential buyers of an impression to look at that individual impression and decide the bid amount using their own systems and data (behavioral, profile, etc.). Bidding is not for a group of impressions but for one specific impression. Further, the bidding occurs as the impression occurs and not in advance of the impression. Accordingly, information useful to bidding on a particular impression is known by the bidder. A browser-side RTB auction takes place inside the end user's browser, soliciting bids from the siloed systems, awarding the win to the highest bidder, and charging that bidder the amount it had bid. Unlike server-to-server or bid application programming interface (API) approaches, in a browser-side RTB mechanism, bidders have access to their own respective cookies on the end user in real time which allows for cross platform frequency cap and budget management, in addition to live behavioral and profile targeting. As a result, browser-side RTB allows buyers (known as bidders) to obtain substantially more impressions of highest value to them, allowing them to deliver larger, more valuable campaigns to their advertisers, while translating all this to higher yields for end publishers.
One problem with the existing RTB mechanism is that of privacy/security for the both the user and the advertiser. In other words, an advertiser may build an extensive proprietary knowledge base (e.g., behavioral or profile information for a particular user, frequency information such as when and how often different ads are served to a particular user, etc.). Further, the advertiser may develop a proprietary bidding strategy for impressions in an RTB based system. Accordingly, it is desirable to protect data while the data is in the browser. In addition, it is desirable to obfuscate portions of the data as it passes through the browser from all parties (including the browser itself) (i.e., it is desirable to obfuscate communications and bidding details once received). In this regard, an advertiser/bidder may not want competitors to know/learn anything about the bid or bid amount.
Further, it is desirable to restrict a phantom website from gathering metrics/statistics on the bidding process (e.g., by a competitor soliciting bids for selected advertisements). In other words, it is desirable to prevent a browser that is conducting an auction from accessing information regarding the winning bids for an impression or who the winning bidder is for a particular impression. The prior art not only fails to recognize the problems described above but also fails to provide any protection mechanism to solve the problems.